Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Moderator writes "Could Gnome drop support for non-Linux operating systems? That was a recent proposal on the Gnome mailing list, although there were significantobjections in response. Quoting: 'It is harmful to pretend that you are writing the OS core to work on any number of different kernels...the time has come for GNOME to embrace Linux a bit more boldly.'"

Agreed. Even as it becomes less customisable (so as not to frighten the less-experienced, apparently), Gnome gets ever more bloated as time goes by.Methinks the Gnome developers have totally lost the plot.

I was waiting to see if they screw up the 3.0 branch and piss everyone off like kde4 did, but I guess the anticipation was killing them so they had to find a way to start alienating users now, in spite of having no newly-designed crappy interface yet.

Calling users of lean, efficient interfaces (who often script in additional functionality to fit our needs) "masochists" just makes you look like a n00b.

Actually it's because I've endured numerous desktops under UNIX / Linux over the 20+ years I've been using them and I dislike those that make me spend more time fixing & tweaking the desktop than doing the things I'm running the desktop for in the first place. The desktop's job is to facilitate stuff the user wants to do, to adopt a sensible set of defaults, to provide a reasonable amount of customization, to be forgiving of errors, to provide all the functionality a normal user needs through a GUI (i.

My sentiments too. The perennial problem with Linux is usability, that users are expected to have in depth knowledge of their operating system just to use a desktop and work around its flaws. It makes no sense at all. If Linux is more usable, it becomes more productive. If Linux is more usable, more people will use it which is a net benefit to the platform and people who make a living from the platform. I suspect there are people who see Linux as an exclusive clique and that attempts to open it up are someh

I'm guessing that there's going to be a backlash from the various people that are writing programs using GTK+. Seriously, I'd be thrilled not to have to choose between the best utility of a type and not having to install GTK. It's a serious pain that one almost inevitably ends up with both kdelibs and GTK installed because there's invariably that one application which uses the other set of libraries for which there is no suitable replacement that uses ones preferred set of libraries.

Gnome isn't the controlling factor for Gtk+, and that support would never have OS lock. We're only talking about "Gnome" here, not Gimp or the Gimp ToolKit (Gtk). Gnome is just another user of the widget set that happens to share a first letter.

We're actually not even talking about most of Gnome. Just Gnome Shell.

I don't give a shit about Gtk+. However, Glib is critical to my ability to port certain software to other OS's; lots of Unix software uses a Glib event loop, GObject's, GModule's, and GThread's underneath. If Gtk+ goes Linux only, how long until Glib also does?

I don't give a shit about Gtk+. However, Glib is critical to my ability to port certain software to other OS's; lots of Unix software uses a Glib event loop, GObject's, GModule's, and GThread's underneath. If Gtk+ goes Linux only, how long until Glib also does?

How about you stop shitting yourself and actually research the discussion, before making a complete picture of yourself as a mix of paranoia.

This is a dumb idea for software architecture reasons, too. I'll explain.

When writing a Windows application, you must recognize that the interface between your application and TODAY'S version of Windows must remain fluid such that you can support changes delivered by patch or by OS release. This is known formally as "decoupling" and it is necessary to isolate big systems that need to communicate. Decoupling is important for unix applications as well, because kernels change over time and APIs vary slightly between unixes.

If you truly believe your application gains anything by eliminating a decoupling library/layer, you have missed the point of the past few DECADES of object-oriented programming.

KDE is far from the only recourse, as there are a number of other Desktop Environments already in common use, including XFCE and Unity/GNOME 2. However, GNOME requiring systemd would be a giant mistake as it would be a kick in the face not only for non-Linux based OSes, but for any Linux-based distro that use a different init. I haven't followed the Canonical/GNOME controversies much, but this inclines me to think Canonical isn't being as unreasonable as some think to diverge from GNOME. Optional systemd integration is probably a good idea.

KDE on the next release is looking to be the same. Hello? release it as early beta and do NOT call it a release until all the tools that are used to make it useful to noobs are ported to the changes.

Instead we get a mature interface that is abandonded and will not support it anymore because they all moved to the new shiny.

The "mature interface" was quite frankly the result of years of hacks, that were somehow superglued together.The most basic change sometimes involved rewriting major subsystems, and tons of projects ended up being abandoned because they were practically impossible to incorporate into KDE 3.5.

The real problem with KDE 4 though, was distros making it default AGAINST THE WISHES OF KDE DEVELOPERS.KDE Developers has specifically stated that distros looking for stability and feature-parity should wait until later KDE 4.X releases, but distros wanting to be "cutting-edge" forced it on users.KDE 4.0 was intended as a call to developers to port their applications over with a promise of relative stability in the KDE libraries from that point, and a call for theme developers and the like to do the same, and a chance for the morbidly curious or advanced users to get used to the new system, it was never intended to be "finished".I won't say I agree with their decision to bump the version number, but it was already delayed and they decided that to not put it off further would speed up the porting of applications and the finishing of the DE, and they were very clear about what the release was and wasn't.

While there is something to what you say about the final user experience being what matters, you are also a little too short sighted. Sometimes working around other people's crappy product is just too much for developers to be reasonably expected to do.
So to go with your example, say the electricity on one floor of your house goes out after the plumber came, and the plumber explains that it seems the incompetent ass that wired your house didn't bother running a negative line to that floor, but just twiste

Sun has invested truckloads of money and man-hours into Gnome, adopted it as the default Solaris UI. I don't follow things very carefully regarding Gnome and Sun(/oracle) lately, so it may be that Solaris doesn't use Gnome animore, I don't know, but after all the investments that Sun made into Gnome, I would be surprised if it would be so easy to just make it for Linux. There's lots of code to support other platforms, in Gnome.

Not that I would mind, to be honest. I couldn't stand Gnome back in the 1.x days

I'm not sure what benefit we'd see from this. Unless they want to tie metadata in the file system with the user interface (like OS/2 had with HPFS extended attributes) I don't see what would be gained. Maybe I'm being short sighted.

Either that, or it is another move by the Gnome folks to remove features. Being multi-platform was a feature. We also know that too many features confuse the user. Therefore removing this feature helps reduce confusion. Personally, I'm waiting for Gnome to reduce itself to a

And therefore Lennart Poettering, who has said this sort of stuff A LOT.

I have no major objection to change, or to things like PulseAudio (not that I use it on many systems). However the "leave it all behind, let's do cool stuff with the advanced features of the linux kernel" argument is an odd one.

For an init process like systemd, sure, I can see that. For a desktop manager/wm/application suite? Not so much.

And if the advanced feature is not present on the kernel that is running, then the desktop app has to just panic and quit? Why not just not use that feature that isn't there? The Gnome Grave is now over a meter deep. Are they still digging?

Really folks I know that Linux right now is the big users but there are BSD and Solaris users out there as well. Not to mention the tech unicorn HURD. Gnome is GPL so it could still be ported but I think just requireing a Unix Like OS should be good enough.Anyone know how xfce is doing these days?

BSD: Pretty much super niche. Gnome is probably too bloated for their lean and mean servers anywaysSolaris: Only got support because Sun dumped a pile of money to replace CDE? Maybe not but none the less, the dream of thin client computing in the form of remote desktops seems a distant dream that is thankfully dead.Linux: The duopoly of desktop environments means that Gnome needs to be very competitive hereWindows: On windows, the gnome support helps port over many familiar Linux based apps to a windows wor

In the BSD community, there is a desktop movement (PC-BSD, several smaller forks out there). While I haven't seen a lot of support behind Gnome (most BSD desktop projects default to KDE or something even leaner), Gnome going Linux only would force the desktop movement in BSD to pretty much go KDE.

Frankly Gnome is too bloated for most users at this point. Going Linux only wouldn't fix Gnome's problems, their projects are much, much bigger.

You do realize that some people do use *BSD for a desktop, right? It's stable, flexible, and with the coming of projects like PC-BSD and DesktopBSD, it's more or less trivial to get it running for a user. As trivial as it is to get some of the more consumer oriented Linux distros up and running.

Personally, I'd shed no tears at all if both KDE and Gnome were to disappear, the environments seem to want to install all sorts of things which I may or may not want, and while they are useful for some people, it's

You do realize that some people do use *BSD for a desktop, right? It's stable, flexible, and with the coming of projects like PC-BSD and DesktopBSD, it's more or less trivial to get it running for a user. As trivial as it is to get some of the more consumer oriented Linux distros up and running.

I used BSD as my desktop system for several years, back in the early 2000's, then switched to linux because of endless hassles trying to get a full set of desktop apps working. Last year, because of hassles with poor quality in some ubuntu releases, I decided to try switching back to BSD. It would be fair to say that PC-BSD was "more or less trivial to get it running." However, I was only able to get about half of my desktop apps to work, which was exactly the reason that I had originally switched from BSD

Most Gnome apps require an X server under OS X meaning they suck donkey balls. They don't use the global menu, copy-and-paste works differently, and they generally don't "look right." I have seen GTK-applications compiled natively for Aqua and while the situation is better from a UI point of view, the build process is the worst thing I've ever encountered. For instance, Gnucash requires to be installed into/opt and insists on starting its own dbus instance (even though there's already one running) and doe

I think you're missing out on PC-BSD [pcbsd.org], which is a more desktop-oriented FreeBSD. There's also DragonflyBSD which was developed to improve SMP support, again largely for desktop performance.

If you'd run CDE, you'd be in a better place to appreciate GNOME's usability on Solaris. I don't see what this has to do with thin clients either.

Gtk support on OS X has traditionally been kind of iffy. I haven't had luck running Haskell + Gtk on OS X. I am not aware of any apps that use it. It doesn't help that Qt supports OS X natively.

Ultimately, I think the question is whether or not the loss is worth the gain. I don't personally use GNOME but I also don't see the potential gain here as being worth the loss of community. It's not a great idea to abandon any segment of your userbase, because the rest of your userbase will get skittish. Not something you need with a combination of high-profile competition (Unity) and consistently eroding support. I don't think this is likely to go through, but if it does, I'd say you can expect GNOME to be dead within two or three years.

There are some Linux apps that are used by Windows people who don't want to pay for the 'real thing' or pirate them.IE: Open Office instead of MS Office. (probably doesn't NEED GTK anyway)the GIMP instead of Photo Shop (this would be a problem....)

Since there isn't a mature Gtk+ port for Cocoa and X11 apps are second class on OSX, GNOME apps are definitely marginalized on OSX similar to how they are on Windows. I use Gtk+ Emacs, but Emacs is not really "native" anywhere so it hardly matters. I've heard it may be possible to avoid running OSX's GUI stuff entirely and just run an X11 DE, but that's hardly worth it compared to simply replacing it with GNU/Linux or some other Free OS.

BSD:
OSX: I can't really say much about it. Are OSX Gnome apps considered first class citizens or are they marginalized much the same way it is in windows?

Considering that by it's nature, Gnome doesn't really place nicely with the OSX api, it's more like that it inherently marginalizes itself. Of course there is nothing preventing it from making use of OS X's BSD core or working as a main desktop in a Darwin system which would make that the same as a BSD answer. That of course would require more specific work in each case.

I currently use gnome on my Linux and FreeBSD platforms, and have for quite some years. Now they're looking to tell the rest of us to PFO because they've tied themselves too tightly to Linux... why is it even tied to the kernel anyway?

The end result will be that I and others won't use Gnome at all (not even on my Linux installs)... but, hey, if your "be all you can be" plan is all about working on only one system, that's fine. Just don't be surprised when the number of people who use it drops off.

The days that desktop environments are only GUIs and only consisted of a bunch of windows that paint stuff on the screen are long over. These days desktop environment handle a lot more lower-level stuff, and users rightfully expect them to do so. Think for example user interfaces for managing hardware, system settings (user accounts, security, firewall, wired and wireless network), etc. GNOME depends on various background daemons that must be started at boot. All of these things have system-dependent mechanisms. Configuring the wireless network is completely different between FreeBSD, Solaris and Linux. All 3 of those OSes have a completely different init system, completely different firewall system, etc.

I have to disagree. I believe, it would be possible to work with a common configuration api (e.g. what the user sees and interacts with) with modules for each OS; much like the webhosting control panels do. Configuring wireless parameters can also be brought to a common denominator.

And none of that stuff is hard to deal with. Look end users don't build Gnome unless they are pretty advanced. Distributions package Gnome or they don't. So all you have to do is have a middle layer. That middle layer has a specified backend. You tell the distros look you need to create a/etc/gnome.rc directory (or something else if you pass option to configure). In that directory you need to have scripts for the following named rd.wireless, rc.firewall, rc.adduser, rc.deluser, rc.moduser and so on

Because it's claimed that systemd will provide "better user experience" as espoused here [wordpress.com]. I don't really buy most of the arguments like since many them don't seem to be things that should require a dependency on an init system to fix.

I want GNOME to be a competitor to KDE, and I want it to work on a variety of platforms or the KDE guys could get complacent.

It might also complicate the idea of a Universal Desktop standard API. Essentially, the direction I think the open source community is heading with KDE, which would mean GNOME would have potentially a lot more work to do themselves reinventing the wheel.

I also don't like the packager ramifications of GNOME desktops existing with KDE in the future

As a dev of Dungeon Crawl [develz.org], I see that systems that smell like Unix these days are a monoculture of Linux and Linux only. Even though you'd expect roguelike players to be biased towards obscure systems, I don't recall a single bug report from a *BSD or Solaris user. Even Hurd had one. Big-endian systems are dead too (two distinct users, one with an old MacOS X, one with Debian on powerpc).

If I were a non-Linux dev who'd contributed to Gnome, I'd be seriously considering a fork no matter what the outcome of this is. If there's one thing I've learned from working on open-source projects, it's that once the Linux Zealots' radical proposals start gaining real traction it's time to bail.

These changes are not being proposed by zealot's. These changes are being made through corporate decisions. Almost every single gnome dev in favor of this move works for Redhat. It's an effort will eventually shut out competing companies like Canonical and Oracle unless they either fork the project, or switch to another DE. Oracle has the money to throw developers at it, but they only care about their hardware. Canonical is way too small to do it, barely breaking even in revenues (if even that).

Outside a few egomaniacs with a one distro to bind them all mentality, this is not how things have been done up till now. I don't think the larger community wants to change either.

FreeDesktop.org has turned out some nice software but I don't like what they doing. Its one thing to suggest some high-level standards and try to create some consistency among projects that are already tied to a set of core libraries, its another to have to assume your specific daemon systemd or whatever is running. There is no reason to require something like that when it would be simple enough to abstract things in away that highlevel stuff like a gtk dialog can start an stop services in whatever way a particular distro wants to set things up.

Taking Gnome entirely Linux specific is the same deal, it means you have to accept a whole heap of stuff and conventions or you can't use it all. Thats dumb, ultimately its going to make distributions more varied not less. As a few core decisions will determine the entire software stack.

Over the short term it will enable people to polish up somethings and make them work real nice, as time marches on though its going to mean that something written for a Debian based distro wont be portable at all to something based on REHL or Slackware, or any of the BSDs. We will all end up with few software choices not more.

The problem is that Gnome has always fit in an odd spot. Above X11 (which is OS/Hardware Dependent's) and below the Windows Manager (In which GNOME often lets you choose who you want, to an extent). I would think Gnome Development if becomeing a Linux-Only product should be used to help remove X11 from Linux.X11 has become Linux's problem.

The XWindows system was designed as a way to view a GUI over a network. For its time it was quite good at what it needed to do. Sending vector images, common commands to

"Sending vector images, common commands to the X Server to display the images worked wonderfully in a world of simple graphics and low bandwith. Today it is becoming extra overhead. " says the man who does not manage a large deployment...

Sorry but MOST linux enterprise installs used X heavily. it's call thin clients and the biggest selling point to get Linux in the door.

$250.00 per user cost with no per seat costs and a reduction of IT staff by 50% is HARD to ignore..... X is what delivers that ability.

Apple is a big fat loser when it comes to remote display. Now many people might be willing to abandon that feature but it can be a very handy thing. In fact, it's such a handy thing that it has been a standard feature for Windows users in corporate environments. I can see how people might criticize the features of remote performance of X when compared to Win7 RDP but this stuff is a disaster in MacOS. It's the sort of afterthought bolt on hack that the OP is whining about....and the wayland idiots seem int

You are doing it wrong.1. If you are an adminstrator of any worth you can do it without X via command line.2. Almost all enterprise Applications that are fairly new are Web Based3. There are other just as affordable or more affordable remote access "thin client" solutions available.

X11 is an aged and out of date protocol. It had its use, today it is a dinosaur. Just because you work on badly managed enterprise or aged model, it doesn't mean everyone else does.

You are doing it wrong.1. If you are an adminstrator of any worth you can do it without X via command line.2. Almost all enterprise Applications that are fairly new are Web Based3. There are other just as affordable or more affordable remote access "thin client" solutions available.

X11 is an aged and out of date protocol. It had its use, today it is a dinosaur. Just because you work on badly managed enterprise or aged model, it doesn't mean everyone else does.

1) No real Scotsman2) Just rewrite all your existing enterprise software to be web based!3) Money is never the issue in enterprise

I haven't seen a deployment like that since the mid 90's. Most places I knew of that did this were replacing them with FAT windows machines because they could do so much more with them and they had gotten so cheap. I just assumed web apps finally displaced that last holdouts to remote X windows usage.

This is what Wayland is for. Not some desktop environment specific rendering subsystem that will require drivers built custom for it. We'd run into the same disaster we have with Android, where no video drivers built for it work with anything else.

The fact that we put a lot of resources to keep X modern is besides the point. If you are going to switch your resources to make Gnome Linux only then Gnome should do more of Linux Only type of work, bypassing all the legacy the X11 has been carrying around.I also fail to see how the Apple GUY actually sucks especially when you compare it to Linux, on the Mac I never had problem with Copy and Past, and still Linux still struggles and it is a crapshoot if it work across applications or not.I don't know abou

So... not a big deal. you can always build it yourself (if you have the skills). I would bet a third party would come along and pick up the task of porting if there is enough interest.

Except, those 3rd parties have already been contributing to it... as has been pointed out, Solaris has adopted and invested time and effort into it... it's been ported to the BSDs and likely has benefited from some bug fixes from them...

This more or less throws away the fact that people who aren't tied to Linux have bee

Not to say there isn't a few good ones. They wouldn't have to worry about cross platform library's and focus more on core functionally. Lets face it, we are never going to see Gnome on windows, Apple uses their own thing and Google is going with the whole web thing.

Why not just make the gnome project its own distro? I mean seriously, this is the first project that has the momentum and even the people to make linux a decent desktop system where I don't have to go into command line evey time I want to use the

There are other operating systems beyond Windows and OS X. Linux is one of many with a miniscule desktop market share. FreeBSD is another contender, and to drop support completely is short sighted with little benefit. Interface with abstractions, maybe create the Linux interface to that abstraction, and allow others to interface to those abstractions. Two birds, one stone.

Being single platform by definition excludes an environment from the list.

It's a tradeoff. There are cases in which one environment is so dominant in the market that excluding other environments saves you more money than you would have earned by including those environments. That's why, for example, very few professionally produced video games are officially ported to Linux during their commercial shelf life, and some are even released only on consoles.

This "GNOME to drop non-Linux support" sensationalism on the net is ridiculous. There has been no such proposal! Yes, I RTFA and the full mailing list discussions.

The proposal in GNOME's desktop-devel-list was by the author and maintainer of systemd to let GNOME adopt systemd as the mechanism to configure certain system-wide settings, like locale and timezone data. This would be implemented as a dbus interface which would spawn a mini-daemon via systemd when that was required. This would solve the age old problem of every distro having their own slight variation on how to configure these things.

Notice the key part of the proposal: the dbus interface. This is the proposed dependency, and not the whole of systemd which, yes is Linux only, but in reality is just a reference implementation for this dbus interface which can be VERY easily reimplemented on any system (the minidaemons themselves are very trivial, porting systemd to other platforms however is not).

What this proposal ACTUALLY means:
(a) Non Linux platforms, or Linux distros not yet using systemd, would initially have grayed out certain configuration options in the control center, like locale for example.
(b) These settings can be made available just by implementing a trivial dbus interface.

Nothing of this dropping non-Linux OS support nonsense. Hope this clears up the nonsense somewhat

So with that if Gnome wanted to make their own GnomeOS and then Fedora/CentOS/Ubuntu/whoever would have to do their own ports of the Gnome GUI who does it bother? No one. Sure at some point I'd have to reinstall my machine with GnomeXYZ instead of Fedora, but I have no invested interest in Fedora over CentOS or whoever. I use Fedora simply because I used to use RH and I prefer typing yum instead of apt-get, that's it. I don't really care about the various difference

Gnome has become a mental disorder. While I believe, as tvelocity has pointed out [slashdot.org], that the headline is not altogether accurate, still this is just one in a series of steps Gnome has staggered into, by which it is rapidly degenerating into a pool of crap. Witness: the train wreck of Gnome3 and Gnome Shell, which is complete garbage. Gnome2 should be forked and development continued by people with functioning brains. I'm not going to go ballistic, because KDE does not seem to be losing its mind, notwiths

I used to use FreeBSD and Gnome was becoming an annoyance back then. Gnome started doing things like dumping OSS for ALSA and using video standards taht only worked under Linux.

If you used Gnome 2.0 or 2.2 under BSD you are using a heavily patched version that grew more and more significantly different as Gnome matured. Sun called their gui the Java desktop as it was mere Gnome based for Solaris. I remember an interview with the FreeBSD team where they were clashing with gnome developers. The problem is KDE

Gnome went from being the most usable, stable, "just works" DE for unix-like systems, to a steaming pile of crap, IMHO. I'm still in shock that they took a stable, functional foundation that was Gnome 2, and just literally threw it all away. I tried to give Gnome 3 a chance, but it's like a damned cell-phone UI.

It seems some developers of Gnome want it to become a distribution, and eventually even the kernel. First abandon other Unix systems for Linux. Then abandon Linux itself to be its own OS. Given how crappy the GUI based system admin tools are now, I see this as heading over the cliff.

This is about the GNOME Toolkit (GTK) rather than the GNOME shell itself (which doesn't run on Windows AFAIK). The Windows port allows applications like GIMP to run on Windows.

Removing support for other environments would be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it would allow you to concentrate more efforts on making the Linux features better. On the flipside, it could really hurt open-source adoption - if GTK apps become unavailable on Windows, you obviously can't try them out without running Linux, whic